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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29493360">Precious Pain</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gyre_and_Gimble/pseuds/Gyre_and_Gimble'>Gyre_and_Gimble</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Bedside Manners [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Vampyr (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood Drinking, Consensual Blood Drinking, Hurt/Comfort, Inner Beast, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Power Dynamics, Pre-Slash, Religious Themes, Reversed Power Dynamics, Vampiric Instincts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 00:28:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,257</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29493360</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gyre_and_Gimble/pseuds/Gyre_and_Gimble</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>*Now with a very important end note!* &lt;3</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sean Hampton/Jonathan Reid</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Bedside Manners [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2094597</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Precious Pain</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/lacrimalis/gifts">lacrimalis</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is a direct continuation of “For Science!” Since it focuses more on the relationship between Sean and Jonathan, I decided to make it not into a third chapter but rather its own, standalone sequel. Enjoy!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Jonathan never makes it out of the Pembroke without talking to anyone, and that has never been more true than it is tonight.</p>
<p>He supposes that he can’t blame them, the patients and staff, what with the disappearance and apparent murder. Nurse Branagan has the ill fortune of being the duty nurse, tonight, and is on her knees attempting to sop up the worst of the blood streaked across the foyer’s tiles.</p>
<p>Harriet’s private room is in shambles. A blood trail sweeps across the floor, and a pool of it has gathered beneath the mattress, which was at some point flung from the wire bedframe that now lies overturned beneath the window. The bloodstains on the mattress begin no higher than the bottom two thirds, which tells Jonathan nothing except that Mr. Hampton might have bitten her arm or stomach, first.</p>
<p>Not a vampire, then. A Skal? Unlikely; without exception every Skal Jonathan has encountered has been a slavering beast, devoid of intelligence or spirit behind their rheumy, weeping eyes.</p>
<p>This is of course to say nothing of Lady Ashbury’s continued insistence that they are lesser, savage creatures, although Jonathan feels compelled to disagree with her on principle after everything that’s transpired between them.</p>
<p>For Sean’s sake, Jonathan certainly does hope she is wrong.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>~*~</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A bad turn at the docks puts Jonathan in a warehouse with five of Priwen’s militia. They are arguing over the corpse of a man who Jonathan initially mistakes for Darius Petrescu, but once the men are dead he sees that this is someone else. Jonathan doesn’t know him – a docker, by the cut of his clothes and the callouses on his hands – but the wounds are deep, their flesh torn and tattered: the aftermath of rabid violence.</p>
<p>Jonathan wonders whether Sean is responsible for this and feels at once a sinking despair and something like pride or admiration. For a killer newly reborn, the man appears to possess significant strength and savagery.</p>
<p>While it dozes quietly in the satiated, hindmost part of Jonathan’s mind, his beast produces what feels like a trill of passing interest against the taut-drawn strings of Jonathan’s investigative thought.</p>
<p>The quarantine zones and Priwen patrols do not make it easy for Jonathan to reach the night asylum; the most direct route is sealed off by an uncompromising iron gate with a notice of quarantine plastered to the brickwork beside it. Jonathan is therefore compelled to circumnavigate the waterfront.</p>
<p>He wishes he could say it smelled of fish and low tide, of damp hemp rope and rotting wood – but all he can smell is disease and filth, the noxious tang of putrefied flesh and the acrid stink of gunpowder and lead. He is forced to kill a handful of Skals along his way and feels his stomach churn as he considers the fate that may be closing in on the East End’s resident Saint.</p>
<p>He manages to sneak past a sortie of Priwen thugs by making his way quietly under the piers and up to the streets above. Dropping down from a hastily-erected scaffold, Jonathan finds a rusted <em>Motored Merchant Services</em> lorry among heaps of pig-iron beams in what appears to be an abandoned construction site as he enters the vicinity of the night shelter.</p>
<p>In the cold, sickly light of the streetlamps, the tall arms of two unmoving cranes, buried up to their guide pulleys in stacks of wood and iron, look to Jonathan like nothing so much as gallows grimly looming.</p>
<p>His new acquaintance, one Miss Giselle Paxton, is kind enough to call Jonathan an enemy of the working class before saying she won’t help him find Sean. He’s man enough to admit that it does sting just a little when she taunts him with the suggestion that his father had been a banker, or perhaps a doctor himself. She strikes Jonathan as an honest woman, so he brushes the insults aside and doesn’t ponder embracing her the way he still ponders embracing Clay Cox.</p>
<p>The shelter doesn’t stink of death the way the hospital does, but by now the smells of poverty are familiar to Jonathan. They aren’t altogether different from the smells of war, only here the scent of gunpowder is faint and there isn’t as much screaming.</p>
<p>He should thank heaven for small mercies, he supposes.</p>
<p>The place is tall – four stories, but with a clear link to the sewer where a concrete stairway descends into the ground. Jonathan wonders what sort of production went on here before it came to be a shelter for London’s indigent and downtrodden. His musings are interrupted when he senses a familiar heartbeat close by – behind an open office door near to the shelter’s entrance.</p>
<p>Mr. Hampton walks so strangely, now, as if he must drag himself along. His limbs are limp, gesturing weakly as he mutters to himself and listlessly paces. Jonathan knocks twice on the door before stepping through.</p>
<p>There is no mistaking it: the bruised and pockmarked skin, paler now against the dark red shock of his hair and beard; his eyes a pale yellow – not the amber Jonathan had so liked, before – and his pupils are narrow and long.</p>
<p>A Skal.</p>
<p>Mr. Hampton offers Jonathan a smile as he steadies himself against a low cabinet. “Why the long face, doctor?”</p>
<p>In the minutes that follow, Jonathan is forced to critically examine everything he thought he knew about Skals and their behavior. He’s only ever met one other that was capable of coherent speech – Mr. William Bishop – and their association had been as short-lived as the unfortunate Mr. Bishop himself had been. The creatures Jonathan encounters in the docks’ dark alleys and the shadows of Whitechapel’s tenements are savage, brutish, bloodthirsty and, if Jonathan is frank, a little stupid. They are certainly easy enough to lead into traps.</p>
<p>But Sean…</p>
<p>He is clearly unwell, but in possession of such faculties as to give what is at the very least a most convincing display of rationality and decorum, such that Jonathan marvels at the possibility that he could be classified as anything remotely similar to the shrieking animals that haunt the inroads of this ailing city.</p>
<p>“We are blessed, doctor, can’t you see it? The Lord has made us able to walk amongst the plague and aid those that need it.”</p>
<p>“Do you think this is a blessing when God’s own house and holy symbols repel you?”</p>
<p>From anyone else, Sean’s declaration may sound haughty; instead, it is with firm but gentle conviction that he replies, “If that is your burden doctor, so be it. But I do not fear the cross, nor am I forced to take the life of another. My kind doesn’t share your imperfections.”</p>
<p>Jonathan cannot help but laugh, and endeavors to convey that it is not mockery or cruelty that fuels it. To hear a Skal speak of an Ekon’s “imperfections” – why, it would be enough to send Lady Ashbury into a faint, Jonathan is sure.</p>
<p>Sean dismisses him with a faint, beatific smile, and Jonathan hopes the same sight will greet him when he returns.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>~*~</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Jonathan is surprised to meet Old Bridget and her sewer Skals, and surprised further still to discover old Harriet Jones doling out acerbic proclamations from her seat in a moldering armchair. It would be impossible to describe her as “alive and well,” as she is obviously neither – but Jonathan supposes that perhaps “not entirely dead” is good enough for him. At least he can rest assured that Sean Hampton did not, in fact, kill her.</p>
<p>Which means that one more star yet shines for Jonathan.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>~*~</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It is entirely possible that the discomfort Jonathan feels upon his return to Sean’s office is simply the sullen recoiling of his half-baked Protestantism from the fervid light of a Catholic’s ardent devotion, though viewing it this way does little to settle his nerves. The beast makes a disinterested snort from where it lazes in the back of his mind, and Jonathan is happy to take this as confirmation of his having nothing to worry about.</p>
<p>He feels confident he could compel Sean to take his blood. He thinks that this might be the wisest course of action, given everything he’s learned tonight. He begins to suspect that his feelings – the joint desires to protect and to possess – have something to do with the relationship between Ekon and Skal. What their implications might be, he has little idea, and it rankles the parts of him that are eager to bring this affair to a calm, safe, and satisfactory conclusion.</p>
<p>Jonathan sits silently down and attempts to smother his misgivings with an open mind. As Sean takes a chunk of flesh between his lips, plucks it from the fork with teeth whose needle-like points Jonathan glimpses past the scrap of dead fat and muscle, he cannot help but sit transfixed as the newborn Skal chews and swallows with an expression of tranquil ecstasy.</p>
<p>As his eyes slowly open, pale and bright, Sean says, “Thank you, Lord. I am your most humble servant.”</p>
<p>And the thing about this that most interests Jonathan is that Sean looks directly at him as he says it. He is reminded of the slack-jawed, bandaged Skal that had thanked Jonathan and called him “lord,” in the sewer, and it quickens his blood and rouses the beast such that it is a trial to affect a countenance of calm as he proposes the solution whose seed Old Bridget planted in his brain.</p>
<p>Jonathan does not expect Sean to refuse his blood, though he is unsurprised when he does. Awake, now, the beast performs the mental equivalent of shouldering its way past Jonathan, putting a growl into his insistence that Sean reconsider.</p>
<p>Sean pushes back. “No, Dr. Reid – God made me this way. Who am I to disobey His will?”</p>
<p>The beast nearly takes his voice again, but Jonathan is careful to muzzle it as he lowers his shoulders.</p>
<p>“I do envy the peace you’ve found, Sean,” he says carefully, “but these urges… you know the hunger will never be satisfied.”</p>
<p>“I’ve come to embrace the everlasting craving.” Sean has moved and opened the doors to his humble sacristy, setting a candle at the foot of a suffering Christ. “It is a test – a new opportunity for the Almighty to test my faith.”</p>
<p>The impression Jonathan has that the smile on Sean’s face is made with the intention to reassure him does precisely the opposite; while it is more grin than grimace, Jonathan sees the pain drawn in the tight lines of his pallid face.</p>
<p>The beast grows hungry, despite its recent and satisfying meal, and Jonathan discovers that hunger amplifies its distaste for disobedience.</p>
<p>He finds himself stopping short of whatever remark he’d planned on making when he recognizes the shape of that final word: disobedience. As if Sean owes to him the behavior Jonathan – or his beast – desires. As if Jonathan, an Ekon, may demand obedience from a Skal.</p>
<p>It is that thought more than any other that decides for him what he must do.</p>
<p>He takes a careful step back, acutely conscious of the choice he is making – the line he is drawing between the beast and Sean – as he says, “I understand.”</p>
<p>Jonathan leaves the shelter quickly, before the beast has time to shake itself from what Jonathan can only conceptualize as a horrified stupor – the calm before a storm, or perhaps the prelude to a tantrum by an especially vocal and violent child. He secures from Sean an agreement that Jonathan should be allowed to return to check on him the next evening. Jonathan has the distinct feeling that, if he had handled the situation differently, Sean would not have been half so keen to submit to a physical examination by an Ekon who had recently traumatized him. Instead, he’d assented to the suggestion readily, though with a small amount of visible confusion at Jonathan’s sudden and dogged determination to bring their meeting to a close.</p>
<p>It takes everything Jonathan has to keep the creature now throwing itself against the walls of his mind contained until he hits the street – to keep from snapping at any of the suddenly infuriating mortals unfortunate enough to be in his way.</p>
<p>Sean requires a delicate touch; a forward show of aggression will <em>not</em> get Jonathan where he would like to be. He endeavors to impress this upon the part of him that snarls and snaps, but the creature remains ill at ease.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>~*~</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It’s early in the evening when he finishes at the shelter – only 11pm – so he has time to make his rounds through the city after setting the beast free to run on a pack of unfortunate Priwen men. Careful management of his combat abilities ensures that Jonathan is able to keep his clothes in a fit state, though it is a near thing.</p>
<p>It’s as he’s finishing up at the docks and making his way north into Whitechapel that doubts begin to chew at the edges of his mind. He bats them away, does his best to ignore them, but they return stronger each time. A few short hours later, and their teeth are rasping against Jonathan’s resolve like hungry dogs at war with a marrow bone.</p>
<p>In thinking about Sean, he cannot help but recall poor William Bishop. He had been cogent even in the midst of his mania – could articulate himself and behave with intelligence – but beneath it had lurked that sickness, the psychosis brought on by his days-long transformation into a Skal. He’d retained the ability to speak and interact with others, but it had been clear he was in an irregular state of mind. Tom and Sabrina had said of Will that night that he had been hysterical and filthy, talking nonsense and entertaining delusions of persecution.</p>
<p>Jonathan recalls with discomforting clarity the febrile, zealous energy Sean had shown for his reimagined sacrament, the conviction of confirmed faith as he’d assured Jonathan of his fortitude.  If dejection and persecution are one side of the Skal’s fever, he muses grimly, frenzy and religious fervor may turn out to be the other.</p>
<p>And later, when he’d found Bishop and Sean in that dirty corner of the city, beneath the canning factory, Bishop had been able to make himself understood: he’d told Sean that he was his best and only friend, that he just needed a little more to slake his thirst.</p>
<p>There’s a painful feeling in Jonathan’s chest as he remembers the way Sean had looked that night: pale, fragile, and so certain that he could have saved that poor creature. His only concern had been for his flock: the people he’d chosen to protect, the people he loved. A chosen family.</p>
<p>The beast emits a sullen grumble as it sulks in the back of Jonathan's mind.</p>
<p>It is a reckless love, Jonathan thinks. Sean was flirting with suicide by following its edicts. Even if, by some miracle, he had been able to escape from Bishop’s lair himself, Jonathan cannot imagine that Sean would have gone anywhere other than to the night shelter, rather than to the hospital as he had so desperately needed.</p>
<p>Jonathan’s thoughts are cloudy as he walks, aimless, down Whitechapel Road. Sean is delicate, he muses, despite the ways his power has quickly grown. Even if Jonathan could be assured that Sean possesses strength enough to defend himself, now that he is a Skal, he cannot help but worry that the kind heart that thumps lethargically in his chest might stand in the way of the wise application of force, if ever the need for it arose.</p>
<p>The beast is restless. Jonathan drains two Priwen jackboots with little remorse in an attempt to appease it, but its appetite only grows. It knows for what it hungers and will accept no lesser meal; London’s streets could run with the blood of multitudes, and still they would thirst.</p>
<p>Jonathan tells himself this does not unnerve him.</p>
<p>He is confronted by a small pack of rabid Skals near the Swanborough residence, in the gloomy courtyard. They are no match for him, but he can’t help but look at them differently, now. They are wild-eyed and vicious, grunting, shrieking – entirely unlike Old Bridget and her sewer Skals, utterly and completely removed from Sean’s cordial manner, his voice that speaks kindly of comfort and safety. There is so little of both in London, these days. This is another way in which Sean is much too important for anything to happen to him: his departure would be a disastrous blow to the declining health of this ailing city.</p>
<p>Jonathan attempts to dispel the teeth-gnashing energy that pricks his heels by dispatching more of Priwen and the infected Skals. He retraces his steps, patrols roads he knows he’s already been down. He’s only just begun to grow angry with himself for whiling away his precious hours of moonlight in futile wandering when he realizes he is back at the night shelter.</p>
<p>There is no one around at this dark hour of the morning to hear Jonathan curse himself, to see his teeth come out. He turns on his heel and prepares to trudge back to the hospital, but something stops him before he can pass the first green triage tent.</p>
<p>It’s a sound – so low as to almost be a feeling, something crawling up his legs and down his fingers, and immediately he knows that something is wrong.</p>
<p>Well, not him, really – the man himself is busy with his frustration and fretting. He thinks he’s made a mistake.</p>
<p>Simple creature that he is, he does not realize when his willful movement ends, and his other half takes silent possession of his form and faculties. He is still engaged with what the beast deems petty concerns as it prowls into the grim cavern in which a dozen fragile mortals lay asleep. The man begins to realize that it is not he who is in control when the beast narrows their sight to track the quarry he is too distracted to know the beast is already seeking out. Their feet carry them silently through the unlocked door to the office that is awash in the scent of something that the beast knows belongs to them.</p>
<p>It abdicates control to its deep-thinking counterpart once it has moved their body close enough to make plain what they are here to do. It still takes the foolish thing long moments of blinking and staring and <em>more thinking</em> before he finally takes notice of what the beast has endeavored to show him.</p>
<p>The dark is no impediment to an Ekon’s eyes, and his ears are far more discerning than a human’s could ever be. It is therefore with the awkward discomfort of an accidental voyeur that Jonathan, once he is reunited with his senses, hears the tearful muttering and stilted, quiet sobs that emanate from the door leading down into the sewer from the darkened office.</p>
<p>Cautious steps take Jonathan down the creaking wooden stairs, though he doesn’t remember asking them to do so. The wood groans pitifully beneath his weight, but there is no change in the sounds that come from behind the door to suggest his presence has been noticed. Jonathan takes a fortifying breath before gently knocking.</p>
<p>Instantly, the air goes still.</p>
<p>“Mr. Hampton?” Jonathan calls softly. “Are you in there?”</p>
<p>The silence he receives in answer plunges Jonathan suddenly into an ice bath of terror. Why is he here? He shouldn’t be here – Sean had refused his help, and Jonathan had accepted his refusal. He’d said he would return tomorrow night, not a short few hours later. What if he is intruding on something deeply private?</p>
<p>The beast has nothing to say on the matter. It watches as the man it lives inside of tumbles into a whirl of failing confidence and rising doubt until, at last, they receive an answer: tremulous, distant and unsure –</p>
<p>“Dr. Reid?”</p>
<p>A feeling of possessive purpose swells in Jonathan’s chest, and for the first time tonight he feels that he and the beast are of one mind.</p>
<p>It makes Jonathan seriously consider tearing the door apart with nothing but his bare hands and the blood in his veins – the bitter stuff he’s taken from the unwise gunners and violent creatures that got in his way tonight. If there is any trace of the honey-sweet nectar he took from Edgar hours ago, Jonathan cannot feel it.</p>
<p>He is gathering his strength, preparing to shape his blood into weapons that will bring him closer to where he is needed, when the voice comes softly again.</p>
<p>“I-I’m fine, Dr. Reid,” Sean says, low and weak. “Just… praying, is all.”</p>
<p>Jonathan has fashioned his blood into a volley of spears, suspended in the air and at the ready. The beast nudges him to speak.</p>
<p>“Mr. Hampton,” Jonathan begins, “I’m terribly sorry to intrude, but I…”</p>
<p>He, what? He had a feeling that something was wrong, so he’s come to break down the man’s door in the dead of night? He’s decided that he doesn’t trust Sean, after all, and has returned to force him to do what he had earlier refused to?</p>
<p>With a measured, deliberate sigh, Jonathan lowers his hackles and draws back some of his blood. After the first few pints, however, he begins to notice a small, but extraordinarily meaningful, reduction in temperature. While mystically suspended, whatever heat the blood had held was quickly surrendered to the colder air surrounding it. Seconds later, the change is many times worse: it puts the taste of low tide in his mouth, as if his entire body is choking on muddy saltwater.</p>
<p>It is here that Jonathan becomes acquainted with the sensory violation that is the taste of cold blood.</p>
<p>In a reaction he cannot hope to control, Jonathan draws himself inward and stumbles back. The remaining liter of weaponized blood spills across the floor, and Jonathan’s face contorts into the woeful grimace of a man who’s just had the great misfortune of swallowing a flagon of bilgewater.</p>
<p>He evidently vocalizes some part of this dreadful experience, because in short moments Jonathan hears Sean’s voice. “Dr. Reid? There’s a key hidden just under the rug at your feet, do you see it? Unlock the door and I can help.”</p>
<p>It is not until after the door is clumsily unlocked and violently thrown open, when Jonathan lays eyes on Sean again, that he thinks to question how – never mind <em>why</em> – the man came to be locked in the sewer.</p>
<p>He is discouraged from asking when he understands precisely what he’s looking at.</p>
<p>There in the doorway stands Sean Hampton, but neither of his minds can at first believe it. He is so gaunt, so pale – paler than a scant few hours ago, with a sickly cast to his skin and an unnerving light in his eyes.</p>
<p>From his mouth to his knees, he is covered in blood.</p>
<p>Compared to the cold blood fiasco of a moment ago, the stink of dead flesh seems to Jonathan not half so bad as it had when he’d first encountered it in the room below the office. Perhaps that is because its scent is commingled with that of the man presently regarding Jonathan as if he is the devil himself, beating down his door in the dead of night.</p>
<p>“Are you alright, Doctor?”</p>
<p>Sean’s voice is weak and thick with recent tears. A sickly shade of yellow has begun to overtake his sclerae, lending them a jaundiced sheen as he raises pale, trembling fingers. “Do you need my help?”</p>
<p>Jonathan moves quickly to catch Sean before he can crumple to the floor. “Sean? Sean, what’s the matter?”</p>
<p>A hot, shuddering breath passes through Sean’s lips, over Reid’s shoulder. Jonathan pushes back the part of his mind that is avidly noting each of the ways in which it wants, more than anything, to slowly and decadently consume this man, and instead leans into his need to care for him.</p>
<p>“Sean, speak to me,” Jonathan instructs as he slowly lowers the shivering Saint to the ground. As Jonathan steadies him against the wall, the weak candlelight of the room beyond reveals to him some of what has transpired since he was last here.</p>
<p>Upon the table are lain two cadavers, very fresh. Both have been exsanguinated by way of their wrists, with bowls set beneath them to catch the blood. There are dark smears on the floor, some of which might be writing, and, to Jonathan’s mounting unease, a field of rust-colored crosses scrawled upon the concrete.</p>
<p>“I couldn’t do it,” Sean laments softly. “I told myself no, no, Sean, you can’t, it’s not right, they’re your friends.”</p>
<p>Jonathan’s eyes snap to him. “Did you kill these people, Sean?”</p>
<p>Eyes squeezed shut, Sean shakes his head. “No, no, I’d never – 'no hands that shed innocent blood'… 'whosoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death'.”</p>
<p>Jonathan examines Sean’s eyes, his clammy skin, thready pulse, the shallow heave of his chest. “Sean, I need you to tell me what happened to those people.”</p>
<p>He realizes that, between himself and the beast, he isn’t sure what sort of answer he wants to hear.</p>
<p>“They were my friends – died together by their own hands earlier tonight, God forgive them.” Sean’s eyes are glassy and distant. “I must pray for them, Dr. Reid – I must pray, or their souls will never know peace.”</p>
<p>Jonathan observes the shaking of Sean’s hands as they clutch his rosary. “I’m more concerned about your own soul,” he says. “You are unwell, Sean.”</p>
<p>The poor creature raises a staying hand, as if he’d like to disagree, but even this movement proves too much for him; his hand falls limply to his thigh as his breath comes short and ragged.</p>
<p>Jonathan purses his lips. It is an effort to keep the beast’s growl from his voice when he asks, “Why did you tell me you were alright, when I knocked?”</p>
<p>He has never felt so endeared by glassy eyes and sallow cheeks as he does when Sean’s tears begin to fall.</p>
<p>“I thought…” Sean trails off, raising a weary hand to his forehead. “I suppose I was…”</p>
<p>His eyes flick to Reid’s face, only to fall in the next instant. “Embarrassed,” he finishes quietly.</p>
<p>The growl becomes a whine so quickly Jonathan is nearly swept up in his passenger’s desire to render comfort and consolation. Fortunately, Sean is in no fit state to notice or comment upon the stilted, careful movement of Jonathan’s hands away from Sean’s person. It won’t do for him to indulge in urges such as these while Sean is so fragile.</p>
<p>The beast makes its displeasure known with a wave of frustration and longing that crashes against the will of the man in whom it is trapped.</p>
<p>“You’ve nothing to be embarrassed about,” Jonathan soothes, heart splintering as he watches Sean’s tears quietly and freely fall. “These urges, the needs – they aren’t an indictment of your character.”</p>
<p>Sean’s head is shaking fitfully. “You misunderstand,” he croaks. “The Lord has seen fit to make me this way; I welcome His teachings.”</p>
<p>There it is, again: the brief, cautious glance.</p>
<p>“It’s… it’s that I’m hungry for <em>your</em> blood.” Sean’s throat works restlessly. “Ever since you offered, it’s all I could think on. It grew so bad... I thought that maybe any blood would do. You wouldn’t be back for another full day.”</p>
<p>It is a deep, painful sort of dismay that fills Jonathan’s mind with the noise of the beast’s miserable howling.</p>
<p>“I didn’t want to endanger my flock. But no matter what I did, it was never enough. Made myself sick with it, couldn’t keep it down. It just made the thirst worse.”</p>
<p>Unwilling to trust himself to remain so close, Jonathan rocks back on the balls of his feet, folding his hands loosely between his knees. “The relationship between Ekons and Skals is… complex,” he offers gently. “I hardly understand it myself.”</p>
<p>He cannot clench his teeth fast enough to keep himself from admitting, “I was…drawn to you, again tonight. I hadn’t planned on returning so soon, but I thought… I <em>felt</em>…”</p>
<p>Sean’s attention has become suddenly and intensely focused on something past Jonathan’s shoulder. Following his gaze, Jonathan realizes that Sean has seen the small pool of blood left behind when he had failed to reabsorb the last of his spears.</p>
<p>Sean’s pupils dilate and his lips curl back to reveal his teeth. His mouth falls open with a guttural hiss and he sways forward, as if intending to pounce.</p>
<p>As quickly as it comes, the change is gone: Sean’s expression falls back into one of horrified misery as he gags, clapping a hand over his mouth as fresh tears begin to fall.</p>
<p>“I can do all through Him who gives me strength,” he insists through heaving sobs. “The Lord is my shepherd. He will not abandon me.”</p>
<p>The drumming of Jonathan’s heart tells him that the beast is ready to step in. Jonathan hastily consigns it to the back of his mind, but feels its strength growing the longer he denies it.</p>
<p>Sean’s hand falls away from his mouth as he pitches to one side, just catching himself before he falls to the cold, hard floor, onto which he spits out a few ounces of sour blood.</p>
<p>He continues to heave long after his stomach is empty. “Forgive me,” Sean whimpers, arms shaking, “Lord Almighty, forgive me.”</p>
<p>Jonathan moves with such speed it is a miracle that neither he nor Sean winds up on the floor. Instead, Jonathan falls to his knees and finds himself wrapping his arms around Sean’s trembling body, cradling the back of his head and holding him close.</p>
<p>Sean stiffens, and Jonathan fears he’s made a mistake. Instead, and to what feels like the great relief of all parties, a great sigh shudders through Sean as he falls limp, content in an instant to be supported.</p>
<p>Jonathan says, in a voice that softly rumbles, “It’s alright.”</p>
<p>For endless, beautiful seconds, there is harmony: the sweet relief of urges finally satisfied, of deep and desperate needs at last being met. There is a warmth that feels impossible, secure and safe and much too wonderful to be anything but right.</p>
<p>Sean weeps, and Jonathan comforts him. The imaginary line he’s drawn between the place where he ends and the beast begins is all but entirely forgotten, discarded in favor of relishing the closeness, the unqualified intimacy of this moment.</p>
<p>When at last they do part, Sean’s face is all Jonathan can see: open and curious and afraid, stained with tears that have cut wandering trails through the dried blood on his chin.</p>
<p>Without thinking, Jonathan reaches into the inside pocket of his coat and retrieves a small bottle of clean water and a handkerchief. Generally useful for touching up his appearance after a kill, he now puts them to use carefully cleaning Sean’s face and mouth. The Saint does not react, except to search Jonathan’s eyes as he gently works.</p>
<p>Jonathan tucks handkerchief and water back into his coat. “God is faithful.”</p>
<p>At this Sean blinks, a shallow crease between his brows. “Dr. Reid?”</p>
<p>“I’ve never been a very good Christian,” Jonathan elaborates, a little sheepish, “but there is one thing I remember from what little of the Bible I did study.”</p>
<p>He helps Sean gain his feet, guides him gingerly to the narrow bed in the corner of the office. Once the pale and shivering Skal has been seated, Jonathan kneels before him.</p>
<p>“God is faithful,” he repeats. “He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.” Carefully, firmly, he takes Sean’s hands in both of his.</p>
<p>“But when you are tempted,” Jonathan finishes, “He will provide you a way out, so that you may endure it.”</p>
<p>Beyond pain and guarded confusion, Sean’s face is inscrutable to Jonathan.</p>
<p>He presses on: “Let me be your way out.”</p>
<p>Sean’s pale, luminous eyes blink slowly.</p>
<p>“I cannot make you do this,” Jonathan confesses. It feels as though the beast would like to disagree, but in the face of their newfound and uneasy peace, it refrains. “This is your choice. It has always been your choice.”</p>
<p>To his surprise, Jonathan feels the prickle of approaching tears. He cries so seldom, these days. “But please, Sean, reconsider. I don’t know what this is,” he admits, squeezing Sean’s fingers in his own, “but I know that I do not want to lose it.”</p>
<p>The beast rises, and in Jonathan’s voice it affectionately growls, “To lose you.”</p>
<p>Sean’s eyes are wide, but his breathing is even, his posture relaxed. It occurs to Jonathan that he may be mistaking exhaustion for calm, but when the hands inside his own deliver cautious, gentle pressure to his fingers, the worry flees him.</p>
<p>“God is faithful,” Sean whispers. Jonathan watches with rapt fascination as a dark tongue emerges to slowly wet Sean's parched lips. “You’re right.”</p>
<p>It is only the fathomless thrill of aborted terror that tells Jonathan just how dearly he needed Sean to accept his proposal – to accept him. Deciding that this is one facet of the psycho-social morass of vampire relationships whose closer examination can wait, Jonathan swiftly – though carefully – retrieves his field surgery kit from another inner pocket of his coat.</p>
<p>Sean is in a delicate state; asking him to bite through skin for his first real meal would be unkind and unnecessary. Instead, Jonathan withdraws a scalpel whose edge glints smartly in the lamplight, aligning it with the prominent vein on the back of his hand.</p>
<p>As blood rises to the surface of his skin, as it trickles in tiny rivulets down into the creases of his palm, Jonathan offers it up as he kneels before Sean.</p>
<p>“As much as you like,” he insists quietly.</p>
<p>Sean’s fingers are delicate and cold, but they spark a pleasant fire everywhere they touch Jonathan’s skin.</p>
<p>“Will it –” Sean clears his throat and, to Jonathan’s dismay, won’t meet his Ekon’s eyes. “Is it always the same way? The… feelings?”</p>
<p>Jonathan blinks. “I don’t follow.”</p>
<p>The beast’s keen interest is taken up by the sight of Sean’s blood-smeared throat as it works to bring words into Sean’s mouth. “When I was in the hospital, that Miss Howcroft and her… friend. Thomas, I think.”</p>
<p><br/>
To Jonathan’s sweet relief, Sean’s eyes – pale and clear, as lovely as winter moonlight – at last meet his. “She fed from him, sometimes,” Sean explains, “and he said… things. They both did.”</p>
<p>One moment becomes two, then three – and at last the pieces fall into place for Jonathan. He recalls the maudlin and macabre exchanges between those two troubled souls:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>My blood and soul: they belong to you now.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>The life running in your veins… this dead flesh needs it.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Oh please, spare me, dark queen. Spare your obedient slave.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Jonathan hangs his head and indulges himself in a relieved smile and voiceless laugh. “No, no, not at all.”</p>
<p>When the moment at last arrives that Sean’s lips meet Jonathan’s flesh, when his blood is nursed into the mouth of the darling, perfect creature that looms over him, it is every bit the ecstasy Jonathan dreamed it might be – a mirror of the contented bliss he feels when drinking deep of Edgar.</p>
<p>While feeding from his willing human is, to Jonathan, a rapturous acceptance of life freely given, the sensation of being fed upon is one of eager and ardent caretaking. With every pull of Sean’s ever-more-eager mouth at the cut on the back of Jonathan’s hand, an impossible flush rises higher in Jonathan’s cheeks, warming his face and chest and neck, and how could he possibly ask for this to stop?</p>
<p>The wound will close soon, he knows, and he wishes it wouldn’t. He wishes he could stay here, knelt on the cold floor beneath his Skal, and surrender to him over and over, to offer all and everything of himself – anything to satisfy him, to give to Sean what he needs.</p>
<p>If the heavy-lidded, dreamy look on Sean’s face when he at last pulls away is any indication, he too has derived something further from this exchange than the satisfaction of his thirst.</p>
<p>“Thank you,” comes Jonathan’s rasping voice. “Thank you, Sean.”</p>
<p>The Skal’s cool fingers relinquish their hold on Jonathan’s hand. “I think…” His eyes fall shut and his head nods forward. “I think I need to lie down.”</p>
<p>Jonathan wordlessly helps Sean to remove his coat and overshirt, busying himself with dimming the lamps to let him manage his trousers on his own. He tucks Sean into bed with no preamble and receives no objection. He cannot help but run his fingers through Sean’s hair as he vows to return the next evening. The drowsy turn of his head into the touch pulls a noise somewhere between a purr and a sigh from Jonathan’s chest. He momentarily fears that Sean will think him indecorous, but the sweet man has already fallen into the tender grasp of an exhausted sleep.</p>
<p>Later, he tells himself as he makes his way back to the Pembroke. There will be time to think more on this development, later: on giving and taking, caring and being cared for, the strange and beautiful depths to which their respective transmutations can bring them.</p>
<p>If the quietude that greets this thought is any indication, he and the beast are, at long last, in mutual, satisfactory, and complete agreement.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hey, so, I’m an idiot and left out this very important end note when I first uploaded, but I’m fixing it now:</p>
<p>Thank you, everyone, SO FUCKING MUCH for your comments and kudos and for reading and being so lovingly, passionately supportive! I can’t remember feeling more proud of anything I’ve ever written, and that’s thanks to all of you. Reading your comments is just... it’s humbling and beautiful and so goddamn validating, just... thank you!! So much!! I love all your faces!!!<br/>(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*✲ﾟ*｡⋆</p></blockquote></div></div>
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